COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS USING ERP AND CLOUD TOOLS

The paper describes the learning experience in the implementation of joint practical training inside of Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance developed by Romanian-American University and University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. The first part shows the results of a survey conducted to over one hundred employing companies in the field of computer science, economics and engineering on the relevant professional and collaboration skills. The survey results underline the importance of practical training that contributes to students’ employability. The survey assessed professional and collaboration skills from the employer point of view. The second part emphasize the learning programs that combines counseling, internships, practical training and virtual enterprise, joining students from computers science, economics and engineering as in real companies. The cloud acts as external environment for virtual enterprises founded and operated by students. The last part describes the software infrastructure used to support the simulated enterprise. In this approach, we considered to use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, to operate technical and economic processes in a single platform, and a team collaboration tool to assist the joint teams from different locations. The case study is based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Office 365 and SharePoint. The research, in brief, present the employers survey results regarding desired students skills, describes the joint practical learning road map, developed projects and virtual enterprise software infrastructure, proofing its novelty by joint practical learning activities, simulating the enterprise and the work environment using ERP and SharePoint platform and also the external framework using cloud infrastructure.